Vijay Kumar

With 4+ years of experience in the software industry, I've gone from admitting not being able to formulate an opinion to receiving feedback from peers asking not to be too opinionated. In that journey, I discovered what it is and various other things that take its form. This little piece of writing is all about those distortions and how to distinguish them from a genuine opinion.

One year into my career, I was in a team with a lot of heated discussions & debates on the system designs & software patterns. Being new to it, I wondered, what on earth would induce such opinions to participate. I saw their contentions in a very different way. To me, they seemed like a fight, more like a war, and there is a winner in the end. Although I've known that the essence of such arguments was to get the design right, the feeling of war stuck to my subconscious, making me defensive.

When I look back at my recent past, at all those debates I've had with my peers, I notice one simple thing: I always had something to say, no matter what the design is or the expectations were from the system under design. You see, this happened because of how I interpreted my initial days of questioning how to induce opinions and relying too much on the little experience that I had gathered.

Subconciously, I went into the path of fake-it-till-you-make-it, forming my ideas based on what I am inclined towards, and I'd go to any extent to defend myself. But that is never a sincere form of it, rather an inclination to something based on instincts masquerading as opinions. These are not good stuff, they lacked reasonability, and I eventually realized it four years into my career.

If you've already gone through the Kali's documentation here, you must have realised that they are a little vague and have no explaination as to why a particular command is being run. This lack of explaination inspired me to write this post.

So basically, what we need to do is install Kali on a USB stick using the dd command. Checkout out this post, or alternatively you can run the following (assuming /dev/sdb is your USB stick):

dd if=path/to/kali-linux-xxxx.x-live-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M

Once you are done with making your USB bootable. You can run fdisk -l to check the partitions. Most likely, you will have 2 partitions under /dev/sdb:

/dev/sdb1 # this might be around 3GB

/dev/sdb2 # around 1MB

Now, the idea is to create a new partition called /dev/sdb3, such that when summed up with /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb2, adds up to 7GB.

Therefore, use fdisk to make the partitions. Alternately you can use gparted which you need to install on your linux machine (you're running currently). I like fdisk as it's available by default, simple (once you understand) and works on CLI.

Running this would start fdisk with a prompt where you can make the neccessary changes to the your USB drive.

fdisk /dev/sdb

Create a new partition using n, select primary partition, then select partition number as 3 (which is given by default) and select the default start block (just hit enter). Now for the end block, give +4G and hit enter. Verify typing p (lists the partitions). If everything looks good (you'll see sdb1, sdb2, sdb3 with different sizes, but should sum to 7GiB) just write the partition table using w (you'll exit out of fdisk prompt after this).

This partition will be used by Live Kali OS to persist changes that will be made in Kali, once you boot using the USB stick.

Enable encryption on this partition so that, if you lose your USB stick, your files stay unreadable. Remember that, if you forget the passphrase to decrypt (which will be asked every time you boot through USB stick), then you won't be able to access it either.

NOTE: Use a password manager to save the partition encryption passphrase.

Running the following will encrypt the partition and will prompt you to provide the passphrase:

cryptsetup --verbose --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/sdb3 cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb3 my_usb

Format the newly created partition and label it persistence using the following command: mkfs.ext3 -L persistence /dev/sdb3 e2label /dev/sdb3 persistence

We are not done yet, as we still have to tell Kali what to enable persistence. And to do that, you'll have to create a directory, mount the partition on the directory and create a config file as follows:

mkdir -p /mnt/p_usb mount /dev/sdb3 /mnt/p_usb echo "/ union" > /mnt/p_usb/persistence.conf

Now, un-mount the partition by running umount /dev/sdb3 command.

Close the encryption channel using:

cryptsetup luksClose /dev/mapper/my_usb

We are done. You can boot through the USB stick (select Live USB Encrypted Persistence in the boot menu) and provide the passphrase for sdb3 when prompted (during the booting process).

The partition /dev/sdb3 will be mounted to /usr/lib/live/mount/persistence/sdb3 and used by Live Kali OS if the password is provided at boot time. If not, the persistence will not be enabled and you'll get the default Kali.

Now, you can update & upgrade your repositories using:

sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade

From GitHub:

With SSH keys, if someone gains access to your computer, they also gain access to every system that uses that key. To add an extra layer of security, you can add a passphrase to your SSH key. You can use ssh-agent to securely save your passphrase so you don't have to reenter it.

From SSH.com

The ssh-agent is a helper program that keeps track of user's identity keys and their passphrases. The agent can then use the keys to log into other servers without having the user type in a password or passphrase again. This implements a form of single sign-on (SSO).

My renewed ThinkPad X250 just got delivered and it’s totally worth it. I hate the fact that I had to pay 18% taxes for this one, but India :shrugs:

Ran a few tests, and mostly everything seems to be working fine except for few dead pixels (not more than 5 pixels) on the screen. Intel AMT was enabled by default and I had to turn it off permanently from the BIOS. I will be wiping my SSD with Windows (10 Pro) and going to make a fresh install of Arch Linux.

Download the tar file and run the following:

Quotes, Philosophy & Key Takeaways:

Think of a mountain where you’ve climbed 2/3rds of it, and you may be struggling at that point. Usually, people tried harder at that point, but most of them never consider climbing it down, try and find a new path to climb up. People are very scared to start over. That’s the quality that separates creative people & successful people from normal people.

For the most part, what you think you know isn’t actually what you know, but it’s just something you’ve got a memorized answer for.

A lot of intelligence these days is just a brain pack of civilization which is documented and is very accessible on the Internet, which you know how to look them up and you’ve memorized some of them, but not good enough to teach it to a child or at the university.